Sometimes, 3D models and sectional diagrams aren’t the best means for an architect to communicate their design. Sometimes fantasy and memoir take the reins, motivating a different approach run by personalized narrative, exhibited solely through images. A couple of standout theses from the Piet Zwart Institute’s Masters of Interior Architecture and Retail Design took this route, creating studies of interior spaces steeped in memory and new possibilities.

Our Student Works focuses on MIARD students Joanne Choueiri and Nathalia Martinez Saavedra, who explore the atmosphere of interiors through, respectively, fantastical illustrations and reality-bending photographs. Influenced by Pompeii’s interior murals and the evolution of the “bourgeois” interior by way of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy, Saavedra’s thesis, “Interior Portraits”, is a photography study of an apartment interior in Rotterdam. Her pieces use lengthy exposures and staged projections to capture vectors of movement and time, flipping the coin of interiors as being wholly separate from, or permeable to, the outside world. Using a camera obscura to create projected images of the exterior world within her apartment’s interior, Saavedra analogizes the photographer’s gaze literally being brought into the apartment, and with it all the imagery of the outside.